Profile of Hannibal

While a delay would surely be beneficial, CoH3 will be way better in the long run.

That judgement is obviously pure gut feeling, but from what Relic showed so far, they at least seem to know and work on 90% of CoH2's shortcomings. I assume CoH3 comes out fairly buggy, with acceptable optimization and probably overall bad balance. The first >half year will probably be fixing glaring issues and balance, as well as implementing some more "basic" and QoL features.

But there's a lot of promising signs that Relic/CoH3 will fare better. As mentioned above, Relic at least acknowledges a lot of issues and declares they were working on them. If that's really true will be seen, but it's not that they'd completely neglect where designs in CoH2 failed and kept pushing for it. Engagement of the community is higher as well as their hiring of community members into staff might potentially give them a bit better look/understanding how the game looks outside of their testing, at least as long as they actually have to say something.
The current visual fixes regarding contrast and visual hierarchy gave me confidence, that at least that part of the company knows how they can fix stuff quickly if the community calls for it. It's probably blindness to your own work that makes it often hard to detect room for improvement. It could be a hint that Relic does not have sufficient reviewing procedures. It is overall shitty to outsource that part to the community, but overall it can still yield a good game.

Other smaller factors will likely also contribute in the long run to a better game. Just to mention one: While it initially doesn't sound special that there will be four instead of the usual two factions at launch besides having twice the amount of equipment to play with, it will surely make the introduction of new factions via DLC smoother. CoH2 suffered a lot downstream from the DLCs, because Wehrmacht and Soviets have been balanced so intricately to one another, that - in combination with Relic's shoddy design for the new factions - the introduction of the new factions not only lead to problems for the new ones, but heavy changes on the old ones as well. Having four factions at launch will at the very least mitigate that.
I haven't followed AoE4 an awful lot, but from what I get the factions there are also more asymmetric than in AoE2, and the faction balance has become alright. The game also seems to regain players at the moment, so Relic seems to be able now to weather some storm and improve the game they have.
And last but not least: CoH is Relic's core franchise. They have more interest in keeping CoH alive than AoE, so in the end they'll also invest more resources into CoH if need to be.


My best guess is that buying CoH3 6-12 months post launch is probably the best strategy if you like the franchise. At this point, the game should be decently fixed with the initial weaknesses being addressed to not distract from the actual improvements.



(edited typos)

The answer is: clearly not.

Why is this the answer? Because you (nor me nor anybody else) can define what these terms means for COH2 Balance:

• Consistent (across what and when and where?)
  
• Cost for benefit (decided by whom????).
  

That's a very loosely defined and weak argument according to which you basically never need to update any game.
There are clear objective parameters such as cost, performance etc available to sketch out a rough idea. The rest is up for testing. Cost and benefit of an ability can be determined the same way literally all units and abilities have been balanced. Just play test.

If no one could ever properly say that something is too cheap or expensive for what it does, we'd never have any balance update.

There's definitely means to make things more consistent in CoH2, the points you made in the post above have no real argument behind them.

As for Hannibals argument, while I agree with it, can cause a slippery slope. The best example would be "Mark Target" as it does the exact same thing. It doesn't provide much against smaller units such as LV upto all 4 shot MED tanks. However once you get to the Panther and heavier it creates a situation where it takes 1 less shot to kill(sometimes 2 depending on tank). With the prevalence of snares it can be quite disproportionate on the value of the ability. The much larger issue is that most doctrines with Mark Target also have Guards who have access to Button. So you get into a situation where abilities synergize a bit to well and we get to where we are now. (Guards doctrines are over picked)

Definitely there are some downsides to it.

There will be concessions to make as in the example of the button ability. However, the button ability is definitely not an analogous form of things like Panzer Tactitian or Vehicle Repairs. It only exists on one single unit and the ability is integral to the design of Guards. The cost of Guards can reflect how useful they should be against heavies. It doesn't cover all the bases, but you can tune a couple of knobs very specifically.

That's not the case for abilities that are handed out generally to a wide variety of different units.

I read this recent post referring to Ostheer's Panzer Tactician smoke and it gave me a quick thought

Ost already has a simaler feuture on all their vehicles just for a tiny amount of muni in a lot of doctrines. Saving many vehicles from destruction...

The cost of basically no ability in CoH2 is directly scaled towards the benefit. Currently, the paradigm is "same/similar abilities always cost the same" almost regardless of faction or the unit. This definitely makes sense in many cases, e.g. line infantry getting grenades, those grenades having the same profile and costs. Or "standard" mines for 30 munitions also having the same cost across factions. You get the point. It keeps stuff simple to understand, intuitive and also makes sense since the benefit of the respective abilities is fairly similar. At least similar enough to usually not warrant another +5 munitions increase in cost.

However, in some cases it objectively does not make an awful lot of sense. To stick with the example of Panzer Tactician from above: This ability performs the same on all vehicles. You click the button, pay 30 mun, your vehicle rips a pretty big vape, that's it. While there is the possibility to use if offensively, the main use is overwhelmingly defensive: to break break line of sight, gain a couple of seconds and force ground targeting to make your tank survive.
However, the benefit is depending on the unit. Getting e.g. your 251 out alive for 30 mun is nice, but losing it won't be deciding the game either. Getting your P4 out alive for 30 mun could already be game changing. Using this ability on your Brummbar, Panther or even Tiger and getting it out alive not only could, but absolutely will be game changing.

This begs the question if abilities like these should have different costs depending on the unit to keep the benefit to cost ratio a little less lopsided.


(minor edits for clearer structure)

It's a common bug, also with mortars, although the cooldown gets shortened a lot. I am fairly sure other e.g. eocket arty has it too.

I agree though. It is super annoying, especially since the CD is quite long.